Not the usual religious debate, but I thought others might find this interesting...
Archaeologists Explore Two Mysterious Caves Near the Dead SeaPopular Archaeology
Vol. 8 September 2012
Led by Dr. Haim Cohen, a team plans to continue excavating a cave known as "Cave 27", a cave where Cohen had previously conducted excavations in 2003 under the auspices of Haifa University and again in 2006, as well as exploratory investigations of a sealed cave discovered by Cohen during a 2007 survey.
Cave 27, also called the "Mikveh Cave" or Cave of the Pool at Nahal David, is best known for the Second Temple period (530 BCE to 70 CE) mikveh, or ritual cleansing pool, dated to the time of the first centuries B.C. and A.D. It was discovered and excavated just outside the cave entrance. The cave is located in a cliff approximately 400 meters above the Dead Sea and is accessible from a plateau above the cave. Among the many other finds were Early Roman period potsherds, flint tools, remains of straw matting, textiles, date pits, ropes, olive pits, animal bones, two coins of Agrippa I, a glass bottle, an iron trilobate arrowhead from the Early Roman period, a pottery seal with a geometric decoration considered to be from the Chalcolithic period, and an ashen hearth. The most intriguing questions, however, surround the presence of the mikveh at the entrance to the cave, a relatively unusual location for such a feature.
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/september-2012/article/archaeologists-explore-two-mysterious-caves-near-the-dead-sea
I'll be curious to see if those Second Temple archives are found and interpreted. What information might such documents contain? Anything beyond a record of sacrificial offerings collected, Temple Tax, etc.? Anyone have any insight into this?
Keeping a mikveh filled with water in consistently 100*+ surroundings must have been quite the chore, especially given the location of said mikveh...
Edited for clarity (I hope).
= new reply since forum marked as read
I am really hoping there is more material out there to be found. The bulk of the temple treasure was probably discovered a long time ago by the Romans, or perhaps recovered later by Jews over the next few decades. But who knows?
As far as a cache of Temple Documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves may be a big part of it. There is an interpretation that rather than being the product of a putative Essene monastery at Qumran, they were taken from the Temple at Jerusalem and brought to the desert for safekeeping. What is fascinating to me is that given the location and time period, it would seem very likely that Jesus' brother James handled many of these very scrolls.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Wrote_The_Dead_Sea_Scrolls%3F
One of the documents that tie the scrolls to Jerusalem is the Copper Scroll, which purports to be a kind of verbal treasure map indicating where caches of valuables have been hidden. As you might expect, scholars have had little success finding some of these places ("forty paces north of the tree by the well at Zeke's house in Jericho"
. Some scholars think it's a fiction, but the makers of the scroll thought went to great trouble and expense to create the scroll from metal and have the text painstakingly copied. Some of the mistakes suggest that the writer did not know Hebrew, which would be a way of keeping the artisan in the dark.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_Scroll
